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Friday, January 23, 2009

Does evolution lead to disbelief in God?

So does a belief in evolution automatically lead to
disbelief in God? Actually, Darwin didn't think that. Darwin was not an
"intellectually fulfilled atheist"; rather, he called himself an
agnostic. Atheists say God does not exist, while agnostics say they
don't know one way or the other. Moreover, Darwin did not boast about
his unbelief; rather, he approached it with marked public caution.
Shocking the mores of traditional believers may be Dawkins's thing, but
it certainly wasn't Darwin's.

Here we must distinguish between Darwin the scientist
and Darwin the unbeliever. Darwin, who was raised Anglican and even
considered becoming a clergyman, did eventually relinquish his
Christian faith. But he did not do so because of evolution.

The story is told in Adrian Desmond and James Moore's authoritative biography, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist.
When Darwin's daughter Annie died at age 10, Darwin came to hate the
God he blamed for this. This was in 1851, eight years before Darwin
released Origin of Species.

Around the time of Annie's death, Darwin also wrote
that if Christianity were true, then it would follow that his
grandfather Erasmus Darwin and many of his closest family friends would
be in hell. Darwin found this utterly unacceptable, given that these
men were wise and kind and generous. Darwin's rejection of God was less
an act of unbelief than a rebellion against the kind of God posited by
Christianity. A God who would allow a young girl to die and good people
to go to hell was not anyone whom Darwin wanted to worship.

Comments

Yes well Darwin's dislike of his perceived God was obviously derived straight from that awful man Calvin. What I cannot figure out about Darwin is how he came to persist in thinking that such a concept as Mercy/Forgiveness/Justice could have hatched and survived from the "Survival of The Fittest" egg. He obviously closed his mind to some important stuff. Everyone from the writer of Genesis, through the prologue to St John's gospel to Dante could have set him straight - if he'd wanted to be, that is. He had no real grasp of the Mystery of Faith and Hope except he did have a blind faith in his own conclusions. He'd have made an effective tyrant if he'd put his mind to it.

"Darwin's rejection of God was less an act of unbelief than a rebellion against the kind of God posited by Christianity. A God who would allow a young girl to die and good people to go to hell was not anyone whom Darwin wanted to worship."

I have trouble with this sort of thing too, mostly in the lives of others. I want to give them faith that God does not just simply cast us away because one of our checkmarks hasn't been erased from God's "black book of sins" or whatever. But I don't even know where to begin to explain this to those who have already turned away from God, convinced of this.

Initially, the way I solve related problems with The Story are that:
(a) good people don't die, they go on to Life as we were promised; and,
(b) people who seem like they are good could actually be people who have done terrible things in their own lives, things for which they never atoned.

(a) seems logically and theologically valid to me, and (b) is borne-out pretty well in history: there are very few REAL heroes, and most of them are Saints or were absolved before death.

"When Darwin's co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote him to say that evolution could not account for man's moral and spiritual nature, Darwin accused him of jeopardizing the whole theory..."

This would make a lot of sense. Ideologues have a tendency to glorify their own, autonomous ideas above the collected wisdom (from their perspective, error) of the human race.

This is a pretty weak article by D'Souza actually. The man is extremely talented and learned, but this piece of writing is much too short and lacking in details.